1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet infrastructures; and, more particularly, to search engines.
2. Related Art
Image search engines are used everywhere to search for images that are available in the hosted web pages and image databases. Users may search for images with a wide variety of interests such as business, engineering and scientific research, as well as home based general interests. Search engines usually select images to be displayed as search result based upon a search keyword (or, search string) and popularity of the images. A plurality of images are displayed in each search result page with a ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons to guide the user to subsequent and previous search result pages, that contain more images.
Users often look for images, having certain type of images in mind such as cartoon, portrait, landscape, graphics, scientific and architecture images. Often, these searches result do not meet user's expectations, because the search engines attempt to match words in the title of the images with that of search string. This results in wide variety of images being displayed, many of them being totally unrelated to the user's subject of interest. In addition, many images contain adult content which are not desirable in many instances, such as when children searching for images or when searching in front of an audience.
For example, a user may enter ‘children art’ as the image search string, desiring to find hand drawn images made by children of specific kind and may receive a long list of images of variety of images, page after page. Images may contain cartoons, pictures taken by children, some hand drawn images, pictures of children drawing images etc. These form wide variety of subjects, very few of which are relevant to the user's search. Not getting desired results in the initial page, the user may step through several screens via the ‘next’ button. This again results in many of the same kind of images that were previously unhelpful.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.